Summary
On October 25, 2008, the Kenyan government launched a joint police-military operation aimed at disarming warring militias in the Mandera region of northeastern Kenya. In fact, this operation was planned as less a law enforcement action than a deliberate and brutal attack on the local civilian population that unfolded systematically over the course of several days.
In this operation, the Kenyan army and police targeted 10 towns and villages, rounding up the population, beating and torturing male residents en masse, and indulging in widespread looting and destruction of property. Members of the security forces raped women in their homes in at least some of the targeted communities while the men were being tortured in the streets. The operation left more than 1,200 injured, one dead, and at least a dozen women raped.
The attacks followed a similar pattern in each community. Starting early in the morning, police and soldiers went around the town beating men, dragging them out of their houses, and forcing them to march or crawl to a central location. Many suffered fractures and injuries from the beatings on the way to the assembly points. Once there, members of the security forces demanded that community members produce and hand over illegal firearms. To force compliance, detainees were made to lie on the ground, and were repeatedly beaten over the course of several hours or an entire day and questioned on the whereabouts of firearms. Human Rights Watch interviewed victims who fainted, vomited blood, and endured continued beating after suffering broken limbs. Some men had their genitals pulled with pliers, tied with wire, or beaten with sticks as a method of torture designed to make them confess and turn over guns.
While the men of each community were being beaten and tortured, members of the security forces went house to house looking for guns, demanding that the women and children at home turn over the weapons of their husbands and fathers. Many women told Human Rights Watch how they were beaten in or near their homes and, in several cases, raped.
In some communities elders pleaded with the commanders to relent and negotiated the release of their men in return for the surrender of the elders’ identity cards, redeemable upon the production of weapons within three days. With the blessing of military commanders, families organized themselves, recovered some weapons from the bush, and purchased others from Somalia in order to hand them over to the police and army and reclaim their identity cards.
Many of those injured, including all but one of the rape victims interviewed by Human Rights Watch, fled to the bush following the operation and treated themselves using traditional methods. Nevertheless, local clinics at Wargadud and Lafey, and the district hospital at El Wak, were overwhelmed. The hospital in El Wak has 32 beds but treated 112 inpatients and roughly 130 more outpatients. The Kenya Red Cross sent mobile clinics to the remote areas and an emergency team to El Wak. They treated more than 1,200 people injured in the attacks and referred several critical cases to Wajir and Nairobi hospitals. One man died from internal bleeding while being transferred. Scores of the men and women injured suffered lasting harm; four months later many complained to Human Rights Watch of debilitating pain that affected their ability to follow their livestock or otherwise earn a living. Several men were still bedridden months after being tortured.
The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and television crews from both major Kenyan TV networks immediately documented what had happened during the operation and called on the government to suspend the operation and hold its forces to account. The initial police reaction was to deny all allegations despite overwhelming evidence including footage of the overflowing hospital in El Wak. In November 2008 the minister for internal security, George Saitoti, promised an inquiry into the allegations of human rights abuses committed during the operation, but there has been no official follow-up since.
An independent inquiry is needed to establish who within the Kenyan government and operational chain of command was aware of how the operation was planned and conducted and why they failed to stop it. Many victims reported that senior police and army commanders were present and supervised the large-scale beating and torture in at least some of the affected communities. Because of the widespread and systematic nature of the torture meted out during the operation, these abuses could rise to the level of crimes against humanity.
The “Mandera Triangle” area of Kenya’s North Eastern province, sandwiched between the borders of Ethiopia and Somalia, has been unstable since colonial times. Its residents, mainly ethnic Somalis, have frequently been the victims of abuses at the hands of Kenyan security forces, especially during almost three decades of emergency rule imposed on the region. Many of the factors driving conflict in the area are well known. Endemic poverty and unemployment, lack of development, environmental degradation, competition over grazing land and other resources, the proliferation of small arms, and the area’s proximity to Somalia have contributed to serious communal clashes in recent decades.
Pastoralist communities in the Mandera area have cross-border ties with kinsmen in Ethiopia and Somalia. Between July and October 2008 a dispute over a borehole escalated into clashes between two of these clans—the Garre and Murulle—and drew in militias from Ethiopia and Somalia. The fighting left 21 people dead, including three security officers. After mediation efforts failed, the government launched the joint operation to “restore law and order,” and disarm the militias.
The Kenyan police and military have an extensive record of turning security operations into deliberate and brutal attacks on civilian populations. The Mandera joint operation pursued an abusive strategy of mass arbitrary detention, torture, and collective punishment—a strategy similar to that used in Mount Elgon in 2008, where the security forces rounded up and tortured hundreds of men, dozens of whom remain “disappeared.”
Yet the joint operations in Mandera and Mount Elgon are just two examples of a broader pattern of police abuse and impunity; the security forces now appear to be a law unto themselves. Police killed protesters indiscriminately during the violence that followed Kenya’s 2007 elections. The minister for internal security acknowledged to Parliament in February 2009 that police death squads had carried out extrajudicial killings of suspected members of the criminal Mungiki gang over several years. And two human rights activists who helped document those extrajudicial executions were themselves gunned down in March 2009—an attack that even Kenya’s prime minister alleged was carried out by the police. No one has been held to account for any of these and other abuses. The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, further criticized abuses by the police and military in unprecedented terms in a May 2009 report.
The government has recently recognized the urgent need for security sector reform and accountability. In May 2009 President Kibaki announced that he had appointed a national task force to fast track police reform. And in June the minister for internal security acknowledged the problem of extrajudicial killings and police abuses during a speech at the UN Human Rights Council. Yet impunity for police abuses is not the result of a few bad apples in the police force, but rather part of a broader crisis of governance and accountability. Politicians and commanders repeatedly plan and authorize brutal operations that violate Kenyan and international law and that include systematic human rights violations as part of the strategy of the operation. The government’s commitment to reform will remain untested until it takes action to replace key officials, undertake sweeping changes in strategy in security operations, and initiate genuine investigations and prosecutions of abusive commanders.
There is a broad consensus that the changes proposed in the report of the Waki Commission to Investigate Post-Election Violence—established in the aftermath of the ethnic violence that followed the contested December 2007 elections—are the right starting point for fundamental root and branch reform of the police service. The national accord that followed the election violence and led to the formation of the coalition government in March 2008 also acknowledged the corrosive effect of impunity and the central role of accountability for Kenya’s future stability. Implementing the proposed reforms and bringing prosecutions would show that the government is serious about ending the impunity that generates these abuses.